I lived in Silicon Valley for five years before I realized it was an actual valley. You can see it on any topographical map, or even a roadmap if you note where the roads go windy and understand that means there are hills. I should have noticed sooner. But it seems like a flat place, a small place, forgotten and the center of the universe at the same time.
The whole Bay Area is rimmed with small coastal mountains, the sort that get only a dusting of snow a few times each winter, and less and less all the time. Silicon Valley hugs that Bay, the mountains all shrugged shoulders around us.
Fifty years ago, this place was filled with fruit trees. If you know where to look, it still is.
This is not an elegy for Silicon Valley.
It’s a strange place, dotted with cute little downtowns in places that once were their own small towns but have now merged into a strange endless city, stretching from San Jose to San Francisco. If you’re not from here, you won’t know that San Jose is actually the larger city. You may not have even heard of it. San Francisco captures our imaginations: tight and dense on the tip of the peninsula, reaching out into the Pacific, full of dreams. It’s picturesque and chaotic and smells bad on hot days just like New York.
Silicon Valley is fifty miles of loose urban development, stretching between two freeways that are themselves between the Bay and the low Santa Clara mountains. Those mountains burned this year, choking the whole valley with smoke. The flames licked at the suburbs and people feared.
Someday, the sea will rise and swallow this place. Menlo Park, home of Facebook, is built on reclaimed land that the water will claim right back if we let it (or maybe even if we don’t). All along the Bay, there is a bike trail that traces the stinking mudflats, land too poor for even Facebook to grab hold of.
Google lurks Bayside, too, and Apple, in their own little enclaves, their towns’ identities so subsumed by these megacompanies that in the big East Coast newspapers the towns and the companies and their CEOs are one and the same. Cupertino said, and so on. Cupertino has Apple, but also grocery stores and subdivisions. Cupertino is not a corporate wasteland.
I live in Mountain View, home to Google. Our biggest road was recently documented in National Geographic as an example of failed urban planning. This is one of the most expensive counties in the country and yet people live all along El Camino Real in broken-down RVs: grad students and day laborers, families and would-be retirees. The old woman who works at CVS and the little girls playing tag in the park.
Recently a law passed here to ban them. But where can they go?
I live in one of the many midrise apartment buildings constructed in the past few years, complete with idyllic inner courtyard and newly planted lemon trees. After all, the old orchards have been plowed into the soil and developed into condos or locked behind tall fences for the wealthy. There are private city parks here, some oxymoron nightmare. You can look through the fence at greenery and dream.
Sometimes I listen in on City Council meetings, trying to be a good resident. Most of the time it’s exactly what you would expect, constant preoccupations with our most famous corporate resident, wondering what Google will do next and what it will mean for us.
We are a small town, people say. We are one of the most important cities in the world.
Less than 100,000 people and yet every major singer stops by on tour.
I love it here sometimes.
Laughing at the antics of little robots on the sidewalks and lumbering self-driving cars, heavy beneath their antlers of sensing equipment, I feel like I’m at the center of the future. Then I think of the people living in their RVs, hated by their neighbors for devaluing their $3 million houses, and I think of the fruit trees.
Sometimes, I do not love it here.